Myanmar

Soft on forced labour

The UN may impose sanctions; the junta doesn't care

NEXT week, critics of Myanmar's military regime will declare a great victory. Unless the junta has a sudden change of heart, the International Labour Organisation, a branch of the United Nations, will recommend that its member countries impose sanctions on Myanmar for failing to stamp out forced labour. But the victory is a hollow one. The fact that the regime has let its dispute with the ILO escalate this far suggests that it is becoming less susceptible to outside pressure, not more.

Most ILO members who are inclined to impose sanctions on Myanmar have already done so. America has the toughest ones: a ban on all imports and financial transactions. Any new measures, if forthcoming, are unlikely to top that. But the junta might easily have avoided the whole episode. It has been co-operating with the ILO on forced labour for the past three years, albeit fitfully. It recently tried three officials for press-ganging villagers into building roads—the first such prosecutions. Yet when four high-powered delegates from the ILO showed up in Yangon last month to try to jolly things along, Than Shwe, the top general, refused to meet them. Instead, various ministers lectured the visitors about the junta's many remarkable achievements. The envoys' reception was so offhand that they decided to cut their trip short and returned home in a huff.

Other critics have met with similar dismissiveness of late. The generals have not allowed Razali Ismail, the UN's special envoy, or Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, its point man on human rights in Myanmar, to visit for over a year. Nor have they resumed talks on the restoration of democracy with Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's leading dissident and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Miss Suu Kyi remains under house arrest, while perhaps 1,200 more political prisoners languish in jail.

Instead, the regime is pressing ahead with the convention it initiated last year to draft a new constitution. These proceedings were farcical enough to begin with: the army handpicked the delegates and stipulated certain key points of the draft, including a prominent role for its own members in future parliaments and regional assemblies. Miss Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, which won Myanmar's most recent elections, in 1990, was not invited.

Now the generals are tightening the screws yet further. Just before the convention resumed last month, the authorities arrested six prominent politicians, all of them members of Myanmar's largest ethnic minority, the Shan. They included the leader of a Shan rebel group that had signed a ceasefire with the government, and the head of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, the party that came second in the 1990 election. Most observers interpreted the arrests as a warning to the only independent voices in the convention, the representatives of former rebel groups and ethnic minorities, not to rock the boat. One former rebel outfit, the Shan State Army-North, dropped out of the convention in protest.

In the meantime, a purge of officials loyal to Khin Nyunt, a senior member of the junta ousted last year, continues apace. Many generals, ministers and ambassadors have already been weeded out; lesser officials are now under scrutiny. Rumours hint at disputes among the top brass over these appointments. But the one thing that all the members of the junta appear to have agreed on is firmly to ignore all external pressure.